In Brightest Africa

I have sat in the top of a tree in the middle of a herd a quarter of a mile from a native village in Uganda in a last desperate effort to inspect the two hundred and fifty eleph...

For many thousands of years lions have appeared in literature and art as savage and ferocious animals. For about that length of time man has been attacking lions and when the li...

In 1910 I was in British East Africa collecting specimens for the group of elephants recently completed in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. My plan at that ti...

"The land teems with the beasts of the chase, infinite in number and incredible in variety. It holds the fiercest beasts of ravin, and the fleetest and most timid of those being...

As a boy I lived on a farm near Clarendon, Orleans County, N. Y., and for some reason, about the time I was thirteen, I got interested in birds. I was out of place on the farm f...

He is a little Kikuyu thirteen years old who has attached himself to our _safari_; a useful little beggar, always finds something to busy himself with; better take him with you....

There is a general belief firmly fixed in the popular mind by constant repetition that the ostrich is a very stupid bird. A man might well expect easy hunting of a bird that tri...

When Herbert Bradley and I started down from Mt. Mikeno to join the ladies of our party at the Mission of the White Friars we had the skeletons, skins, and measurements of four...

In 1905 Nairobi was a town of tin houses, many black people, a few Hindus, and fewer white men. Before my departure for the Athi Plains, where I planned to begin my collections,...

I have dreamt many dreams. Some of them have been forgotten. Others have taken concrete shape and become pleasing or hateful to me in varying degree. But one especially has dwel...

The day after I shot my first gorilla on the slopes of Mikeno I spent in camp. I should have preferred to spend it resting, for the day before had been a strenuous one, especial...

After I had got over my first youthful enthusiasm about taxidermy and had seen how it was practiced, I recognized that, as it then was, it was not an art--that it was in fact li...

The buffalo is different from any other kind of animal in Africa. A lion prefers not to fight a man. He almost never attacks unprovoked, and even when he does attack he is not v...

Soon after my return from my 1905 trip to Africa I got my attention turned away from taxidermy for a little while in a curious fashion. The Field Museum was still in the old Col...

By November 14th, I felt about as happy and about as unhappy as I ever have in my life. I felt exceedingly well about the success of my gorilla hunts. I had four fine specimens...